14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has officially released this month's Patch Tuesday updates, trying to patch a total of 23 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer.
The company has spotted 18 different security issues in Internet Explorer alone, so the MS13-047 bulletin was marked as “critical.”
“An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the current user. This security update is rated Critical for all versions of Internet Explorer, on all supported releases of Microsoft Windows. These issues were privately disclosed and we have not detected any attacks or customer impact,” Microsoft explained in an advisory released a few minutes ago.
In addition, Microsoft has rolled out security bulletin MS13-051 to patch one privately reported vulnerability in the Office productivity suite. Labeled as “important,” the update is supposed to fix issues in Microsoft Office 2013 and Office for Mac 2011.
This time, the Softies explained that some attacks have been indeed launched to exploit this flaw, but the number of successful attempts is yet to be determined.
“The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Office document using an affected version of Microsoft Office software, or previews or opens a specially crafted email message in Outlook while using Microsoft Word as the email reader,” the company added.
As always, all patches are distributed through the integrated Windows Update tool, so make sure you allow your operating system to download and install all available bulletins. The patches are aimed at all Windows versions, starting with XP and ending with 8.
“Customer protection is an important facet of everything we do. We encourage you to apply these security updates if you do not have Automatic Updates enabled, and visit the Microsoft Security Response Center blog for prioritization guidance,” Dustin Childs, group manager, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing told us in a mailed statement.